The listening experience is outstanding in terms of realism, natural sound reproduction, dynamics and clarity. The acoustic quality of this exclusive solution allowed Focal to avoid the use of any crossover or passive filtering process to achieve a frequency response from 5Hz to 50kHz! The equivalent of two tiny authentic loudspeakers over your ears… They meet all the requirements expected of high-end headphones due to their sophisticated and elegant design and to purposeful materiality, such as the carbon fibre yoke and true lambskin leather ear cushions.
#HYPE PRO CARBON EARBUDS DRIVERS#
Utopia are unique: they are the world’s first audiophile headphones featured totally open-backed full-range speaker drivers with pure Beryllium ’M’-shaped domes.
Equipped with exclusive technology, they offer striking realism, neutrality, dynamics and clarity, for sound with unrivalled purity. They are the result of 35 years of innovation, development and manufacturing of high-end speaker drivers and loudspeakers. Similar to quarantine in the current corona crisis, quality flattens the sales curve…which means, it extends the x-axis (time). Quality will always persist (if the manufacturer keeps the product running).Utopia have already become the world reference high-fidelity headphones manufactured in France by Focal. Time may be a slow but reliable “influencer”. Time shows essentially by itself which iem is good and which is not. They naturally cannot consider the fourth dimension, which is time. Reviews/analyses/influencer videos only capture the moment (valid for any product). These brandname products may not get the same initial attention upon their release as Chi-Fi - also considering their higher prices - but they “last longer” on the market and may therefore perform better for the companies (and their reputation) in the long run. For example, Sennheiser hold on to their sonically superseded (=too bassy) Momentum in ear while adding a new line of much flatter-tuned iems. This may be better for the consumer than the Chi-Fi approach but it can also be confusing. They largely don’t rely on influencers/hype, put lots of thought into initial R&D, release (mostly) mature product, and hold on to their models for many years, even when their own assortment is overlapping with newer models. Most “brand manufacturers” have a different approach. An example is the Moondrop Crescent…it likely had to give way for more expensive models.Īs a result of all this, consumers tend to buy the “latest and greatest”, which may end up in a drawer after a relatively short time, in order to be replaced by the next generation. And sometimes, the life of a worthy popular product (and therefore the associated hype) is cut short by the manufacturer itself, simply by taking it off the market prematurely. On the positive side, it stimulates progress, but at the cost of the customer. This shows that companies throw product on the market prematurely, which destroys “consumer confidence” in the long run. Who feels comfortable when a company releases a “Pro” version two months after having spent $200 on the latest “super hybrid” – and this over and over again. While this was somewhat interesting at the low end (almost everybody could and did afford the mass of KZ models at the time…until most of us got tired of it), it becomes problematic in the higher-price regions. Many manufacturers (and distributors/sellers) feed influencers for quick sales of large quantities of sometimes not so great product, and they keep the momentum going by flooding the market with new models in short succession (“shingling”). Promoted largely (but not only) by influencers, most are hot today and forgotten tomorrow.
Budget to mid-tier Chi-Fi iems typically don’t have a long shelf live in our world of hype.
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